« Fragments from the garden », the second solo show of Koka Ramishvili at the gallery Eva Meyer, is composed by a collection of new paintings and photographs. Every work is giving us access to the preoccupations of the artist that questions the surface, the frame, the light and the image.

Koka Ramishvili starts to challenge the moving image since the beginning of his career, more precisely through the way of film and photography. Since some years, painting, mainly as material and support, colour and surface, permits the artist to prolong his reflexion. However, it’s not about abandoning one medium in favour of another but rather considering permanent exchanges between the moving image and painting, between painting and photography.

Each one of those little paintings on wood presented at the gallery is considered by the artist as a fragment of a global installation: a composed partition of coloured notes but also of silence and punctuations. It’s the beauty of the emptiness that accompanies them and gives every fragment it’s own sumptuousness and profundity. Every plywood canvas becomes an accumulation of pictorial layers whose intensity and vibration are accentuated by a mix of oil painting and amber. The frames of the paintings are decentralised - a choice made by the artiste to dissociate the central pictorial practice: the margins, the space and the surface are as much points of crystallisations as the work itself. The barely mentioned motif at the whim of the colours becomes the pretext of a journey and a meditation, of a microcosm that awakens our imaginary.

The photography serie Moving architecture convokes again the image and emphasizes the importance given by the artist through the study of the light. Koka Ramishvili captures different structures in movement, his “light machines”, thanks to the sensibility of the lens of his camera. In this way, he experiments the immateriality of the lightning that is structured by the moving dispositive.

The exhibition is provided in the continuity of the development of the artist, an interdisciplinary research, an artistic practice at the border of materiality and poetry. For the artist, those “Fragments from the garden” are a way to reach through the banality of the subject, the origin and the future of every life, a return to a nature that he calls “a form of the new life”.

Koka Ramishvili was born in 1956 in Tbilissi in Georgia. The artist lives and works in Geneva since 15 years. His work has been presented at many exhibitions in cultural institutions like the Tate Modern in London, the MAMCO in Geneva, the Goethe Institut in Berlin, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nantes, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the MKHA Contemporary in Antwerp, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nancy and the Cobra Museum in Amsterdam. He has also taken part in the International Festival for Documentary and Animated Films (Dok) in Leipzig and the Cairo Biennale. Koka Ramishvili represented Georgia at the Venice Biennal in 2009.